In his wallet, David O. Russell safeguards two lists. One itemizes the titles he wants to rent at the video store. The other the topics he wants to discuss with his shrink. On the first list? Films dealing with illicit love, among them Lilith and King's Row. The contents of the second list he keeps to himself. Obviously, Russell - whose debut feature Spanking the Monkey discreetly probes the tragicomic repercussions of mother-son incest - is a guy who understands the emotional impact of leaving things to the imagination.

CAPTURING the speed of Joe Frazier's fists was a piece of cake for filmmaker Michael K. Bucher. His award-winning documentaries and films included the first Joe Frazier-Muhammad Ali fight, in March 1971, at Madison Square Garden. His ability to capture the speed and drama of sporting events, including auto racing in Daytona, Fla. ("Winning on My Mind") was hailed by contemporaries and by publications like Sports Illustrated and Car and Driver . His documentaries and films, including several full-length movies, won six Golden Globe Awards.

It's hard to name a filmmaker who has enjoyed a more luminous twilight career than the prolific Clint Eastwood, 78, whose conscience-pricked thrillers Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby struck resonant chords of morality and mortality. Though that rueful music underscores Changeling , a melodrama based on the incredible-but-true 1928 mystery of a missing child in Los Angeles, at times it verges on the tinny. What begins as the compressed tale of Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie)

Henry Richardson Hallowell, 93, a Philadelphia businessman, civic leader and world traveler, died Thursday at Cathedral Village in Andorra, where he and his wife, Dorothy, had lived for 12 years. A native of Philadelphia, Mr. Hallowell graduated with honors from William Penn Charter School in 1915 after serving as captain of its undefeated 1914 football team. He graduated from Yale University in 1919 and weeks later married Dorothy Saylor of Pottstown. Mr. Hallowell co-founded the investment firm of Hallowell, Sulzberger, Jenks & Co. in 1945, after working for other firms.

When visitors to Philadelphia's ongoing Dinofest see a sauropod, a dome-headed pachycephalosaur or a Hadrosuarus foulkii, they at least can be sure that what they are seeing is real. In movies, it's getting increasingly harder to tell. Though the advent of digital effects has made it possible for moviemakers to put anything on screen and do it convincingly, the old-fashioned effects artists and model-builders have made some advances of their own. As a result, a new kind of evolutionary rivalry has commenced - a struggle for supremacy among digital dinosaurs and realistic models.

In January 1961, a truck lumbered through the night in the remote savanna of Zaire's Katanga Province. Its cargo included three bodies, knives, saws, whiskey and oil drums filled with sulfuric acid. The liquor was to steady the nerves and stomachs of the men who were to dismember and destroy all trace of the bodies of ousted Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and two political allies. The argument of Raoul Peck's haunting Lumumba: Death of a Prophet is that one of the most charismatic leaders of the postwar fight against colonialism in Africa may have vanished physically, but his memory and his message still speak to succeeding generations.

Fat TV stars, fatigued rock divas, angry movie icons - there they are, staring out from the racks at the supermarket checkout lines. It's a weekly parade of unflattering photographs spread across the pages of the nation's gossip tabloids, and Blast 'Em, an energetic, illuminating documentary, shows us how they got there. And who took them. A plucky film about the jostling, jockeying paparazzi who stalk the prewar apartment buildings and clubs-of-the-moment populated by New York's celebrity contingent, Blast 'Em trains its sights on one preternaturally aggressive young photographer as he chases around in search of the big-money shot.

The photo album, covered in worn green velvet and held together with ornate brass hinges, lay in a jumble of lace and candlesticks on an old table. It was, like everything else in the hall, a piece of used goods, the refuse of previous owners. Or, if you prefer, an antique. I opened the album the way someone in the market for a new home might read the real-estate listings. Was this property something that would suit my family? I thought no more of the former owners than I might have thought of the family who planted the tree in the backyard or added the dormers to the roof of a house for sale.

Somewhere under the "rambow" - more precisely, circa 1982 in a theater playing First Blood , which introduced Sylvester Stallone as troubled Vietnam vet John Rambo - two irresistible forces forged a wary bond. Will and Carter, English schoolboys in the equivalent of sixth grade, have two things in common. Both are misfits. And both are fatherless. In the whimsical, unpredictable and - whee! - exhilarating Son of Rambow , the mates find a fairy godfather in the Stallone character, whose self-reliance and strength attracts them.

London's most amusing slinging single, that knockabout imbiber of alcohol, cigarettes and men, is made flesh, 130 weight-obsessed pounds of it, by Ren?e Zellweger in Bridget Jones's Diary. It is as adorable and predictable a film as the Helen Fielding best-seller that inspired it. The movie, like the novel, traces its DNA to Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. To make it fit the rhyme scheme of a romantic comedy, its screenwriters - Fielding herself, Richard Curtis (Four Weddings and a Funeral)

Everybody knows video stores are dead. Dead as an idea and dead as a business. Except, somehow, Miguel Gomez didn't get the memo. "I am," said the 32-year-old film fanatic, "quite the optimist. " And, in downtown Ardmore, he's making a stand, opening Viva Video: The Last Picture Store in the glassy, three-room expanse of what used to be a toy shop. He's sure he can attract not just a niche of customers but a big, healthy slice, luring people who love browsing for surprises, who dislike the thumbnail-size posters that pass for description on Netflix, and who see a local video store the same way they see a neighborhood coffee shop: A place for sustenance and conversation.

CAPTURING the speed of Joe Frazier's fists was a piece of cake for filmmaker Michael K. Bucher. His award-winning documentaries and films included the first Joe Frazier-Muhammad Ali fight, in March 1971, at Madison Square Garden. His ability to capture the speed and drama of sporting events, including auto racing in Daytona, Fla. ("Winning on My Mind") was hailed by contemporaries and by publications like Sports Illustrated and Car and Driver . His documentaries and films, including several full-length movies, won six Golden Globe Awards.

It's hard to name a filmmaker who has enjoyed a more luminous twilight career than the prolific Clint Eastwood, 78, whose conscience-pricked thrillers Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby struck resonant chords of morality and mortality. Though that rueful music underscores Changeling , a melodrama based on the incredible-but-true 1928 mystery of a missing child in Los Angeles, at times it verges on the tinny. What begins as the compressed tale of Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie)

Somewhere under the "rambow" - more precisely, circa 1982 in a theater playing First Blood , which introduced Sylvester Stallone as troubled Vietnam vet John Rambo - two irresistible forces forged a wary bond. Will and Carter, English schoolboys in the equivalent of sixth grade, have two things in common. Both are misfits. And both are fatherless. In the whimsical, unpredictable and - whee! - exhilarating Son of Rambow , the mates find a fairy godfather in the Stallone character, whose self-reliance and strength attracts them.

The entertainment industry is one of the United States' most lucrative exports. Based on the economic value of this industry, Pennsylvania legislators are being urged by film offices, industry professionals and statewide supporters to expand the state's incentives to draw a bit more of Tinseltown to Pennsylvania. Currently, a 20 percent production grant is available for the making of films, television pilots, and each episode of a television series when at least 60 percent of the total production budget is spent within the commonwealth.

When Night and Day, the 1946 movie biography of Cole Porter, was released, William Bowers, one of the troika responsible for its hackneyed screenplay, apologized profusely to Porter for pasting movie platitudes onto the composer's complex songs. Night and Day is so howlingly bad that it enjoys the dubious distinction of being the worst biopic ever made. For most of the film, Cary Grant, who plays Porter, looks off-camera with such desperation that you'd think he was hunting for an emergency exit.

Ingenious new devices able to see ever tinier, fast-moving objects are providing scientists with striking, 3-D color movies of atoms, molecules and living cells in action. "We can watch the brain think, develop, age, deal with disease. We can see neurons grow inside the living brain," said Jeff Lichtman, a neurobiologist at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. "It's like a movie camera. " While biologists use their new instruments to observe cells, chemists use another new technology to track the motions of the infinitesimal particles - electrons, protons and neutrons - that make up an atom.

London's most amusing slinging single, that knockabout imbiber of alcohol, cigarettes and men, is made flesh, 130 weight-obsessed pounds of it, by Ren?e Zellweger in Bridget Jones's Diary. It is as adorable and predictable a film as the Helen Fielding best-seller that inspired it. The movie, like the novel, traces its DNA to Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. To make it fit the rhyme scheme of a romantic comedy, its screenwriters - Fielding herself, Richard Curtis (Four Weddings and a Funeral)

When visitors to Philadelphia's ongoing Dinofest see a sauropod, a dome-headed pachycephalosaur or a Hadrosuarus foulkii, they at least can be sure that what they are seeing is real. In movies, it's getting increasingly harder to tell. Though the advent of digital effects has made it possible for moviemakers to put anything on screen and do it convincingly, the old-fashioned effects artists and model-builders have made some advances of their own. As a result, a new kind of evolutionary rivalry has commenced - a struggle for supremacy among digital dinosaurs and realistic models.

Of all the high praise we are likely to hear for the great Jimmy Stewart today, maybe the most valuable tribute was left by the man himself. You can say of Stewart something you can say of no other actor - that in all of the 80 or so movies he made in his 50-year career that spanned fundamental transformations in moviemaking, Jimmy Stewart never gave a bad performance. Think about it. A million reels of film, a thousand roles, characters of staggering variety, and not one false note.